Fromm and Goldsmith: Toward a Sane Society 

In his book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm conjectured that a whole society could go insane. He suggested that the growth/expansion/development-oriented trajectory of our civilization has been leading us in that direction. There was not yet a Green movement at the time Fromm was writing (1950s), but his social prescriptions were informed with a communitarian spirit that makes me believe he would have been a supporter.

Greens recognize that social pathology results when a society becomes unmoored from a basic grounding in natural sensibilities of limits and balances. Valuing growth without limit, trying to “advance” ever faster, farther, higher, and bigger leads invariably to the kind of condition we find ourselves in at this point in history - overshoot, depletion, exhaustion.

Fromm pointed out how the problems manifest at a personal/psychological level. Too much, too fast, too big make it difficult to focus, no less cope. Sustaining modern lifeways ("holding up the sky") requires too much in the way of characterological repression. Producing, consuming, maintaining all the “stuff,” hassling with all the complexities results in a lived reality which is stressful, anxiety-provoking, and exhausting.

There’s a feeling in the modern world that everything has “gone hyper”: Life has become hyper-consumptive, hyper-stimulated, hyper-commercialized, hyper-synthetic ... not to mention hyper-individualistic and competitive. The hypertrophied scales of technologies and institutions are intimidating, leading to a generalized anomie. People feel like cogs within the vast social megamachine.

If this perspective is correct, then we might venture to conclude that our society is not just oppressive, not just exploitative, but sick.

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Aware of the above, Edward Goldsmith talked about a “Great U-Turn.” He said we need to recognize how the values of growth and development have led us awry, far from our original connection to nature, place and community. A Green thinker to the core, he advised that our salvation will only come through learning to live more lightly, with renewed appreciation for limits and balances.

For the sake of freedom, satisfaction, and health we need to orient our lives more locally and recover the ability to relate to a particular place-on-earth. Scale down, slow down, decentralize. The Green path shows the way toward social sanity.

Steve Welzer

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